“Contrary to popular opinion,” writes Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, “malls are great, and they always were.”
Did you know that more than a thousand words—e.g. mule deer, prairie dog, snowberry—appeared for the first time in Lewis and Clark’s journals? Neither did I.
Ah, the five-paragraph essay: “a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US.” It’s “dysfunctional – to say nothing of off-putting, infantilising and intellectually arid.”
Speaking of essays, Marilynne Robinson has some thoughts on freedom of conscience.